tell us then how citizens united has made the united states a nation of corporations essentially and not people. >> well, citizens united transformed our politics in the same way that bush versus gore took the last decade from us in essence by deciding the election for that one lucky guy won the election because of the court's intervention. citizens united is really an effort to remake all of american politics in the image of large corporate wealth and large corporate power. we had essentially a wall of separation between corporate treasury wealth and public elections for many decades and the supreme court had said as far back as chief justice john marshall in the dartmouth as recently as chief justice rehnquist and other conservative justices like justice white that a corporation is not a person armed with political rights but it is an artificial entity that's an instrumentality of the state that's used for purposes of accumulating wealth, investing wealth and it does a great job at that. but we should never allow the corporations to breach the barrier between economics and politics